Information Design and Sense-Making c/o Dervin

'Information Design: Something New, Something Old

... I want in this chapter to challenge the central idea that information design is a new idea. Reducing the issues briefly to a polarity, it is useful to start by considering two ways to conceptualize information. One way, implicit in the above assumptions, is that information is something that describes an ordered reality and has some knowable, or at least idealized, isomorphic relationship to that reality (i.e., it represents in an identical way the form and content of reality). In short, information instructs us, this assumption says, about the nature of the world we live in: its history, its future, its functioning, our place in it, our possible
actions, and the potential consequences of those actions.' p.35.

[My emphasis.]

Brenda Dervin. Chaos, Order, and Sense-Making: A Proposed Theory for Information Design (chapter 3) In R. Jacobson (Ed.), Information Design (pp. 35-57). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

Previously: Information design: Tufte & Raskin